This Critical Conversations edition gets its title from an eight-foot-tall beaded textile work by Jeffrey Gibson. ALIVE! is heavy with the weight of glass beads and rows of tin jingles, its color and pattern in the lineage of Gibson’s Choctaw and Cherokee nations. The sculpture’s weight takes flight with the proclamation of space, conjures Jingle Dances, and celebrates I AM ALIVE, YOUR ARE ALIVE, THEY ARE ALIVE, WE ARE LIVING!

Gibson is an exceptional celebrator of contemporary Indigeneity, a MacAurthur Fellow who brought Fancy Dancers to the American Pavillion at the Venice Biennial this year, breaking expectations and making fucking history.

There is a generational aspiration to join Gibson in chorus. We heard it over and over, from varied practices and positions throughout the state, as the work of this collection’s writers crossed our inboxes. We put their stories forward hoping they make room for more. From those who have struggled to find authentic teachers, about those who have taught, and the conversations that consider art and community every day to inch our world toward a slightly better condition.

As editors, we still find remarkable distances traveled since the 2020 launch of this project. We aim to run a publication that travels distances too and we are in the lab thinking about platform and how we connect with our readers to amplify the artists whose work we are here for. With ambitions to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, this publication is a collection of casts from the bows of vessels coming from a range of places who harbor in shared waters.

Many thanks to Jeffrey Gibson for encouragement to use his work as a compass. ALIVE! is permanently installed in Portland State University’s Vamport Building in Portland, Oregon, and is part of the State of Oregon Percent for Art Collection, managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.

Critical Conversations Editorial Board
Meagan Atiyeh
Brian Gillis
Shawna Lipton
Ralph Pugay
Stephanie Snyder

Commissioning Editors
Yaelle S. Amir
Steph Littlebird

Anthony Hudson, drag performance documentation
Ron Jude, Lava Formation From 12 Hz, 2019. Archival pigment print on fiber paper, 56 × 42 in.
Ralph Pugay, Funeral at the Ski Resort, 2022. Acrylic and Flashe on canvas, 30 × 24 in. Courtesy the artist and Adams & Ollman, Photo: Area Array
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The Ford Family Foundation and the University of Oregon are located on the traditional homelands of Indigenous people whose communities have stewarded these lands since time immemorial. Following the arrival of European explorers, the Indigenous communities across Oregon experienced repeated displacement and dispossession through settler colonialism, including the United States government policies that forcibly removed Indigenous populations from their ancestral lands to reservations within and beyond Oregon. Today, the descendants of Oregon’s first people continue to make important contributions to communities, institutions, the state of Oregon, the United States, and the world. We commit to ongoing efforts to center Indigenous presence and knowledge, creativity, resilience, and resistance within the work we do.

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